Tuesday, January 17, 2017

Neighborhoods Parched for Books :: Book Deserts

On the last day of 2016, the Barnes & Noble
bookstore in the Bronx closed its doors for good, leaving New York City’s
poorest borough without a general-interest bookstore. The borough’s 1.5 million
residents — including 200,000 children in public schools — are left without a
place to purchase books.

With this closure, the Bronx is joining an
increasing number of communities that can be classified as “book
deserts” — low-income neighborhoods with limited access to print resources.
Our recently published study suggests that book deserts are becoming more
common in cities across the U.S. The increasing concentration of poverty,
coupled with technological advances that change how we buy and read books, is
leading to neighborhoods where parents will have difficulty finding books to
buy for their children.

Even if, in this age of Amazon, large
brick-and-mortar bookstores are a thing of the past, city planners and
retailers must find ways to ensure that poor neighborhoods are not cut off from
crucial resources, including if not especially books.

And if you think bookstores are a relative
indulgence for neighborhoods that lack good supermarkets, you miss the point.
We recently conducted a study in Detroit, Los Angeles and Washington, D.C., to
learn about the availability of books. In each city, we walked, biked and drove
street by street in a low-income and a middle-income neighborhood, and counted
how many books were available for sale.

The disparity was stunning. One middle-income
neighborhood had one book available per every two children living in the
neighborhood. In a nearby low-income neighborhood, 830 children would have to
share a single book. Across the three cities, middle-income neighborhoods had
16 times more books available for sale than low-income neighborhoods.

Book deserts are particularly detrimental for
young children. Babies and toddlers (who do not yet have access to books in
schools) need to be surrounded by books to develop preliteracy skills. When
very young children are exposed to books and reading, they develop vocabulary
and stretch their brains. When they don’t, they enter pre-K or kindergarten
behind their peers, opening racial and class disparities that only grow over
time.

Libraries offer crucial access to books. But in
many low-income neighborhoods, they are woefully underresourced. When cities
faced tough economic times in recent years, library budgets were slashed,
leading to reduced collections and shorter hours. Even when libraries are open,
some low-income families struggle to find transport to the library. Others
forgo checking out books for fear of fines.

Besides, many children understandably yearn to own
their own books that they can reread frequently at home. When parents and
children are surrounded by books at all times, they are more likely to develop
reading habits.READ
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